Financial advice is a trust-based business, and that trust is neither easily nor instantly earned. Not many clients will decide to hire an advisor who is a complete stranger to them: They need to become confident that the advisor (1) knows what they're talking about and (2) will give advice with the client's best interests in mind. And so in the advice business, the "sales" process isn't always about the product or services that the advisor is selling: It's about the advisor themselves, and whether the client can trust them to give guidance on their most important financial decisions.
There are two broad approaches to building this level of trust with prospective clients. One is on an "inbound" basis, where the advisor works to get marketing materials out into the world that demonstrate their expertise and trustworthiness (e.g., through blogs, podcasts, videos, reviews, etc.) in the hopes that they will be seen by potential good-fit clients who will go on to book a meeting with the advisor. And the other method is "outbound", where the advisor proactively reaches out to individual prospects to pitch their services one-on-one. Both approaches have their ups and downs: Inbound marketing tends to have a higher conversion rate of prospects to clients since the prospect generally only calls when they're ready to hire an advisor, and it usually scales better because it doesn't require much investment beyond the initial time needed to create the content – but it's also highly dependent on whether or not the marketing content is actually viewed by good-fit potential clients, and even if it is, there's no guarantee that those prospects will actually decide to pick up the phone to book a meeting.
Outbound prospecting, by contrast, has the advantage of creating a one-on-one connection between the advisor and prospect right off the bat (rather than relying on the prospect to seek out the advisor's content and decide to move forward with a meeting), which jumpstarts the process of relationship building and, with enough persistence and a big enough list of prospects to reach out to, can take less time than inbound marketing to meaningfully increase growth. But the downside of outbound prospecting is that the close rate tends to be miniscule (since there's no reason necessarily to expect that a prospect whom the advisor cold-calls is actually willing or ready to hire a financial advisor), while the time investment is significantly greater than inbound marketing. Because in reality, most outbound prospecting doesn't tend to be a "one-call close" situation but instead requires a process of following up to establish and build trust and bring the prospect along to the point where they're ready to sign on as a client.
In recent years, a number of AI tools have arisen to address the pain points of outbound prospecting, including FINNY, WealthHawk, WealthFeed, Wealthreach, and Cashmere. These tools may work from a technology perspective, as AI's ability to sift through and connect data points from multiple data sources allows them to create detailed profiles of prospective clients based on publicly available information, so users can narrow down their outreach to prospects who seem to be the best fit. And their generative AI capabilities can create "personalized" (AI-generated) outreach via email, LinkedIn, or other channels, allowing users to scale their outreach efforts much more efficiently. The caveat, however, is that very few advisors actually use outbound prospecting as a primary marketing channel – according to data from the upcoming Kitces Research on Advisor Marketing (to be released in July of 2026), only about 7% of advisors report using "digital cold outreach" tools such as AI prospecting technology. Which makes the market for AI prospecting tools relatively tiny compared to the overall advisor market – and far too small for the 10+ providers now competing for their business.
And so it's notable that FINNY has announced the launch of a new feature, appropriately called "Hunter" (as in hunting for prospects), that expands FINNY's capabilities beyond outbound prospecting and into inbound marketing. Dubbed by FINNY as "your AI Chief Growth Officer", Hunter's AI trains on firm materials to learn the advisor's "voice" and other details like their client niches and value proposition to create content for both inbound marketing (e.g., blog or LinkedIn posts) and outbound prospecting. It then plans and executes those campaigns automatically, with the advisor needing to do little more than provide input on their firm and individual style.
For FINNY, the release of Hunter marks a potential pivot – or at the very least, an expansion – from 'just' handling AI-powered outbound prospecting to being a full-blown digital marketing platform. Which makes sense for them since it allows them to target more advisors than the relative few who do outbound prospecting – which FINNY arguably needed to do after raising $17 million of venture capital funding in December 2025 at a $150 million valuation that only made reasonable sense if a significantly higher number of advisors adopted it than the 7% or so who actually do outbound prospecting. Rather than settle for convincing more advisors to adopt outbound prospecting, FINNY expanded into a digital marketing category which, according to the most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Technology, is used by around 5x as many advisors (35%) as AI prospecting.
The question going forward will be, in an environment where advisors tend to use inbound marketing or outbound prospecting but rarely both at the same time, how many advisors will see value in a tool that handles both inbound and outbound? FINNY has competition in the digital marketing automation space from well established competition like FMG Suite, Snappy Kraken, and Hubspot, in addition to all the providers in the overcrowded Prospecting category. By opening themselves up to competition on both sides from specialized competitors, FINNY risks being caught in the middle as a multifunction tool in an area where advisors may only want something that does one thing and does it well.
In the end, the evolution of FINNY illustrates how there's a limit to how much technology alone can convince advisors to adopt new techniques outside of their existing processes. Even when given the technology designed to smooth out the pain points of outbound prospecting, advisors who prefer inbound marketing will still overwhelmingly stick with that strategy. Which means the advisors who get the most value out of AI prospecting tools will be those who already have an effective follow-up and relationship building process that goes beyond the initial outreach. So tools like FINNY that want to grow beyond that relative handful of firms doing outbound prospecting need to grow their value proposition accordingly.
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-may2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.
In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.
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